Beyond the Basics

Michael Freeman: Words and pictures

It’s a funny thing, but most photographers aren’t very much into writing. Perhaps I’ve got some quirky gene somewhere, because I actually do like writing, and so I do books, and pages like this for Manfrotto – and enjoy it. But there’s a very basic kind of writing that needs to be part of the basic workflow of digital shooting –... [read more]

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Stefan Steinmann: Breaking my rules

In the article I want to tell you something about the sentence: Never say never. Before mid of November it was really the fact that all my pictures were not manipulated by Photoshop. Of cause I sometimes adjusted the brightness and the contrast, I “stamped” some small splashes away but these actions I will call normal picture development. In addition... [read more]

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Frank Düpmann: A tutorial on High Dynamic Range images.

Ruins of former Russian sanatoriums (near Berlin) – „natural“ settings The Dynamic Range (DR) of your favourite camera is limited – that‘s the bad news. It means that in „challenging“ light situations, either the higlights are blown or there are no details in shadows, all black. In the example above, either the windows would... [read more]

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Michael Freeman: Removing the Unwanted

Specks of dust and people who wander uninvited into your frame (or inconveniently hang around and won’t leave) may not seem to have a great deal in common. But for image capture they share the quality of being unwanted. And because of that, they can be dealt with later, if you wish, with similar techniques. These techniques, though, don’t all work... [read more]

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Frey Timo: The Cosmic Girl – Part 2

The second part of this tutorial is about post processing, especially about how you can combine the images we created in the first part. If you missed the first part you can find it here: http://manfrottoschoolofxcellence.com/2011/11/15/frey-timo-the-cosmic-girl/ The first two steps were described in the previous article, we continue with step3 here. Overview... [read more]

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Frey Timo: The Cosmic Girl

The Concept: The idea came to me during a long, rainy weekend.  I sat in front of the TV, absorbing Marvel Comic type films.  That insighted my imagination: a hero composition was needed.  Out was another photo of a super, bicepts equipped Schwarzenegger, sun-beach clothed hero flying through intergalactic space. My photo had to be spiced with a... [read more]

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Michael Freeman – How Gray Will a Color Be?

Several weeks ago I wrote about the relatively new and excellent ways of converting a color image digitally into black and white. The original doesn’t even need to be digital – a scanned transparency will do fine. There’s quite a bit of technical stuff to go into, and at the end of that article, Save the Shot by Throwing Out the Color, I realized... [read more]

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Cristian Berges: Night sky time lapse movies

A deep blue sky with red and orange clouds running over it, getting darker and darker – until finally, the stars appear and draw their circles. http://www.vimeo.com/31248539 That’s what you get if you are lucky – a night sky time lapse movie reveals the movement of the earth, it becomes perceptible. This example movie has been shot in... [read more]

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Stefan Steinmann: An imperfect unique picture

In the article “Crash in a water glass” about the drop on drop photography I mentioned a couple of month ago: “The task is to find the timing, means to trigger your flash and adjust the time between the two drops. If the time between the two drops is too long nothing will happen, the first drop disappears before the second drop reaches the water... [read more]

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Michael Freeman: Low Key

A short while ago we looked at high-key imagery – bright and white. At the opposite end of the scale, naturally, there is another style, low key. And in the same way that creating a high-key photograph calls for a combination of the right kind of subject or scene, and the way of processing the image or handling it later in post-production, so... [read more]

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Stefan Steinmann: Water sculptures II

In my last article I descript how to make pictures of water sculptures generated by a loudspeaker triggered by a radio frequency of 50 to 200Hz. To influence the shape of the sculptures you can change the liquids, the frequency, the power (volume), the material of the second membrane and the size of the membrane. The way you fix the membrane to the... [read more]

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